64 the happy cIrcle of Western democracy the predicament of the American Jews becomes ever more anomalous. For the dnveway may be long and cir- cular, and the living-room carpet may be thick, but the enemy-memory does not fade-except among the handful of Jews who choose to escape J ewishness al- together. And from the perspective of that memory to prattle on about kinship between American Jewry and Mrican-Americans seems not so outlandish after all. For anyone can see that, if the Gypsies are a tragic people and the Jews are another, the Mrican-Americans are still another: marked by spec- tacular defeats; marked, too, by continuing accusations about other than fully human qualities; marked, even-and here the African- American conundrum is classic-by the .I compensatory feats of supreme cultural brilliance, which all the world has had to acknowledge, and which make the sufferings and the successes almost inex- tricable. And the whole phenomenon is, from the perspective of Jewish memory, all too familiar. I T'S true that to detect invisible simi- larities you have to peer through a lens capable of revealing them. In a slightly sentimental mood, some American Jews like to imagine that Judaism itself is their lens. That seems to me a dubious claim. If Judaism per se had any such power of insight, there would be two or three hun- dred years of black-Jewish alliances in the United States by now. But history- real history, not the conspiracy fiend's version-shows nothing of the sort. During slavery times-when Jews counted for half of one per cent, or even less, of the American population-a small number of Jews participated in the slave trade, along with vastly larger num- bers of ChrIstians and Muslims; and a small number of other Jews participated in the abolitionist movement; and the Jews failed to distinguish themselves ei- ther as slavers or as anti-slavers Alternatively, it is sometimes said that the European Holocaust is the Jew- ish lens-though the Holocaust expla- nation stumbles over the same problem of historical dates. Probably the first im- portant moment in the black-Jewish al- liance was the foundillg of the N.AAC.P. in 1909, long before the Nazi era in Eu- rope. Yet that date-not the exact year but the turn-of-the-century era-does point, I think, to the series of ideas and sentiments that finally allowed a large number of Jews to notice similarities be- tween themselves and the blacks. Noone can feel a boot on the neck for long without dreaming of removing it; but only after the American and the French Revolutions did the Old World Jews have the chance to dream along lines of real-life practical- ity. The Old World Jews had been oppressed by superstition and bigotry, by ChristIan and Muslim desires to organize soci- ety according to religious prin- ciples, and by the feudal idea that dynastIc landowners (therefore not the homeless Jews) should dominate society. So the new political al- ternative promoted rationalism and edu- cation-against prejudice and supersti- tion. It promised democratic, secular sovereignty-against theocratic domina- tion. And it promised individual rights, equal for all, to be enforced by law- against an exclusively religious or ethnic vision of society. Enlightenment liberalism was the new idea, and it sliced neatly through the knotty complication of being an unloved minority in a majoritarian world. For the basic unit in the liberal idea was not the exclusive group but the individual per- son, which opened to the Jews the ap- pealing possibility of taking their place at last as members of a self-selected major- ity; namely, the grand, all-embracing majority of free and equal individuals. The French Revolution brought these ideas into the open air, and the French and GermanJews took them up, and the ideas began a steady eastward push into regions where Jews were more numerous and prejudices more ferocious. The stronger the prejudices and the larger the JeWish population, the more ardent was the enthusiasm with which the new ideas were embraced, untIl by the time the emancipatory message finally arrived in darkest Poland and the czarist empire it was received almost in the spirit of a religious conversion. It was the late nineteenth century by then, which was preciselv when the mass emigration of Eastern European Jews got under way. Thus America's Jewish population grew in numbers and in pov- erty but also in ardor. And this new ar- THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 28, 1994 dor for an emancipatory liberal vision of a better society now became, circa 1909, the lens through which some of the American Jews began to notice those oddest of their new fellow-citizens, the ones with no rights in the land of rights, the victims of majority hatred and out- rageous prejudices, their fellows in trag- edy: the blacks. The origin of the Jewish attitude in liberal philosophy accounts, I think, for several of the quirks and oddities of the black-Jewish alliance that now began, very slowly, to emerge. The sympathy for blacks that certain Jews began to feel was not, by and large, a product of personal contact or cultural affinity-except, maybe, in the racially integrated bohemia of jazz and a few other places. The Jews who typically came in contact with blacks during the early and middle twen- tieth century-the old-time Southern Jews and, around the country, the Jew- ish employers of black workers, the not very rich Jewish housewives who hired black housekeepers and were famous for a lack of genteel courtesy, the landlords and the storekeepers who lingered in Northern Jewish neighborhoods after black populations had replaced the Jews-might feel no particular sympathy for the Mrican-American cause. They might even be a little hostile, as a result of irritating face-to-face encounters or in conformity with mainstream American culture. Richard Wright drew quite a few Jewish portraits from the nineteen- twenties and thirties in his autobiogra- phy, "Black Boy," and the good, the bad, and the ugly were all represented. When the Jews did sympathize, it was mostly as a result of abstract politi- cal reflection, and the people who in- dulged in the abstract reflection were not always in a rush to proclaim their own Jewishness. The emancipatory liberalism of the American Jews took an infinity of forms in the twentieth century, and only some of these movements flew a Jewish flag. Many Jews were more likely to pro- claim a doctrine of purer universalism and to relegate Jewishness to the sphere of private life, or perhaps to the sphere of things to be abolished someday, along With every other threat to village athe- ism From the perspective of people with the universalist idea, humanism and lib- eralism, not what they conceived of as Jewishness, brought them to the cause of Mrican America. There is an old and